Where Do I Start? How To Construct Your First Facebook Marketing Audience

So you’ve been given a new client and the likely task of running Facebook advertisements. You might use assets like Google Analytics, social media data as well as information given directly from the new client on their current demographics. Google Analytics is going to be the most helpful interface as most clients may be a bit off or not completely familiar with their demographics, Analytics is quantitative data and it’s best to stick with the facts.

Upon receiving access to Google Analytics from your new client you’ll need to navigate to the ‘Audience’ section on the left navigation panel. This section includes many helpful details that will assist in creating your very first facebook marketing audience from scratch. Listed are a few that we like to explore primarily:

Demographics -> Age & Gender: This section will give you the ability to cut down age targeting and see a correlation in male vs. female visitors.

Interests -> Affinity Categories & In-Market Segments: These are interests and categories your demographic is directly interested in and going to serve as the base interests of your audience so make sure to screenshot these.

Geo -> Language & Location: These give you the base language and country where the visitors are located. *Tip – Apply the secondary dimension ‘City’ to see more specific location details.

Mobile -> Overview: Shows if your demographic is being acquired through desktop or mobile. This can help you decide if mobile only campaigns will be beneficial – or if mobile should be completely ruled out.

Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages: We use this average data to get a better picture of how the audience is currently navigating. Most important here is the pages/session and average session duration. A key asset of social media marketing is the ability to ‘remarket’ to new lead audiences. Here we see that our audience is visiting 3.14 pages per session. This allows us to assume they are navigating further than just the home page land – this is the goal. On the flip side if the audience is only visiting 1-2 pages we need to send them initially further than the homepage so they can be added into our remarketing funnel. This will be discussed further into the audience series.

Now that you have all of this quantitative data you can now build your first audience. It is always best to use data to base your initial audience from rather than going in blind – as it will save time and money in the long run.

Next, you’ll need to navigate to the Facebook interface. Once logged in toyour ads account navigate to ‘Audiences’ (in the top Options panel) and select Create Audience -> Saved Audience.

Use all information gathered from Google Analytics and be sure to add many categories and interests closely related to the data you’ve gathered. Once all attributes are added be sure to choose a name that you’ll use for this audience and ‘Create Audience’. The new audience could take up to 1 hour to populate and will most likely be quite large in size.

Once you’ve built your audience you are ready to launch your first facebook lead advertisement. These advertisements are top funnel and used to gain new traffic to your client’s website in hopes that they then move over to your remarketing funnel. Stay tuned for the second blog of our audience series that will discuss custom audiences from client email lists.

If you’d like any support building your first Facebook marketing audience we are here to help you – Drop Digimar a line today to get started!